


Merry Christmas Nancy

by brokenpromisesandhope



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Abusive Parents, Alcohol, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Celebrations, Future Fic, Gen, Holidays, Loneliness, Self-Acceptance, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-13
Updated: 2018-11-13
Packaged: 2019-08-23 04:56:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16612322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brokenpromisesandhope/pseuds/brokenpromisesandhope
Summary: Nancy spends the holidays alone.





	Merry Christmas Nancy

**Author's Note:**

> This is me trying to convince myself to not go home for the holidays.   
> xx  
> T

It’s not that it’s not hard. Her office coworkers titter around all of November and December discussing their holiday plans. There’s vacations, and talk of how they’re gonna divide time between families. Nancy doesn’t have that problem. She hasn’t been in a serious relationship since high school. She doesn’t have multiple families to jump between. She doesn’t even have one. 

The most festive thing she does is go to the holiday work party. She does like her coworkers, and her boss is nice to look at, and she likes any excuse to get dressed up. Also free booze and food, she’d be dumb to turn it down. It always happens around the fifteenth of December, and she’ll dress in whatever new dress she’d bought for the event. This year it was an emerald green silk dress with a drapey neck that showed off just enough cleavage, and glittery gold pumps. 

She interacts with a few of her coworkers and their spouses, but mostly she eats too many pigs in a blanket and Christmas cookies, and drink whiskey sours, cause she the only way to bond with her father was to sit at the bar while he gambled. She could always hold her liquor, but she knows when it’s time to go home. She usually calls a cab, and stumbles to her apartment, shedding her clothes at the door, and crawling naked into her bed with her cat, Muffin. 

Nancy appreciates Christmas decorations. She walks downtown sometimes, to see the lights and the snow. She goes to the light show and drinks hot chocolate. Sometimes she pours Bailey’s into it. But her house is bare. Not one snowman figurine or Christmas tree. Not even lights. She sends out Holly and Mike’s Christmas presents the second week in Christmas, doesn’t even look at plane tickets. 

She has a tradition. She goes shopping a couple days before Christmas. Buys whiskey and some margarita mix if she’s feeling frisky. She buys chocolate chip cookie dough, and doritos and frozen pizza and ice cream. She’ll order Chinese on the actual holiday, because it’s the only place that’s open. 

She buys herself anything she wants the entire month of December. She generally saves around $500 throughout the year so she can buy herself presents, and by the time Christmas Eve and Christmas Day rolls around, she’s just chilling in her apartment. She watches cheesy Hallmark Christmas movies for 48 hours straight. 

It had taken her a long time to get to this place. She misses it sometimes, being with family. Well not her family, but like, she misses the idea of a family. The last time she’d went home for a holiday was four years ago. She’d been twenty one and still wishing for a family who gave a shit about her. It dissolved into her dad lecturing her about her job, and her mom lecturing her about getting a boyfriend, and she’d been so focused on playing herself with alcohol she’d gotten so drunk, she’d started crying. She’d paid $500 for a flight that night, and had never went back. 

She thought she’d did good for herself. She hadn’t went to college, worked her way up in her company. She made 48k a year thank you very much. She owned her car, had her own apartment, lived comfortably. It’s not her fault that she didn’t have a boyfriend. Who wanted to date someone they met in a bar? She certainly didn’t. One night stands were fun and all but it wasn’t like she was trying to find her future husband. She wasn’t even sure she wanted one, she was comfortable being alone. 

It was sad sometimes. She missed the idea of it. Christmas trees and homemade cookies. But she couldn’t deal with her family anymore. Nothing she’d ever done was good enough, and if it hadn’t been good enough for twenty five years, it never would be. It’s why she’d moved over 1,000 miles away. 

She’d left Nancy Wheeler and Hawkins, Indiana a long way away. She’d chopped her hair, she wore it in a short bob now, with side bangs. She got her hair bleached every six weeks like clockwork. She wore pointy, stiletto shaped acrylics. She had a fucking Coach purse for god’s sake. She dressed like every office pornstar, but yet no one was throwing her down on her desk. 

She read and went to museums, ate bowls of popcorn when she didn’t want to cook. Snuggled with Muffin. Had a closet full of shoes she never had any place to wear. She goes to therapy once every two weeks, and drinks a $5 Starbucks drink every morning because she can. She sees a new movie every Friday night. Leaves in leggings and an old shirt. Brings a blanket and eats the entire tub of buttery popcorn by herself because she can, and there’s no one there to judge her. 

She misses interaction, touch, everything, but in all honesty, she’d learned a long time ago that all you really had was yourself. She’s got her queue of movies already set up, and entirely too many peppermint Hershey kisses that she probably will finish by the end of the Holiday. But soon the Holidays will be over, and her favorite coworker had invited her to a New Years Party, so once Christmas was over, it would be better. She’d get plates of leftover cookies on Monday, and the janitors will have taken the decorations down, and Linda will stop wearing Christmas bows in her hair, and Nancy can go back to pretending she’s not entirely alone.


End file.
